The New Gold Rush in Domain Name Suffixes From .com to .doctor

Dont look for flour, sugar and cooking oil in the Bellevue offices of Donuts Inc. Youre much more likely to find people taking advantage of major new changes in the internet rather than plotting the overthrow of Top Pot or Krispy Kreme.

Donuts is an internet registry founded by four men with a lot of experience in the intricacies of internet domain nomenclature. The firm recently raised more than $100 million in venture capital and has spent $57 million to buy rights to new internet suffixes.

Thats right. The world is just too small to be limited to .com, .net, .org and .gov. After all, if youre a dentist, doesnt it make sense that your branding efforts culminate in DrFeelGood.dentist as opposed to DrFeelGood.com?

The move toward increasing the range of generic Top Level Domain names, more commonly known as gTLDsthose are the internet suffixes to the right of the dothas been surprisingly subtle given the billions of people it may affect. Subtlety, however, isnt the modus operandi at Donuts, which has applied for more than 300 of these new suffixes.

This is a brand new opportunity and its really exciting, says Donuts cofounder and COO Richard Tindal. The internet is about to go from black and white to color.

Thats one mans metaphor and it may be a stretch. But here is whats happening: There are currently 22 approved suffixes, including .com(merce), .gov(ernment), .edu(cation) and .org(anization), as well as 250 two-letter country codes. Earlier this year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the private, nonprofit organization that runs the internets Domain Name System (DNS), announced an open application process for domain expansion to take a significant step forward on the introduction of new generic top-level domains.

From A (.art) to Z (.zone), the suffixes Donuts has applied for suggest an eclectic mix of interests and/or opportunities (see box). Suffixes using nontraditional characters, such as Chinese letters, were also available. (Donuts has applied for characters representing games, store, entertainment and enterprise.) The application fee for each suffix was $185,000 to cover costs like program development and application processing. ICANN took in $350 million in fees from 1,930 proposals.
Big companies with familiar names are in on this domain land grab. Amazon, not surprisingly, wants .book (so does Donuts), along with .cloud and .kindle. Google applied for more than 100 suffixes, including .google and .android. Apple covets .apple. Microsoft wants .bing, .docs, .hotmail and about 20 others.

This is not an endeavor for the underfunded. Once a suffix gets ICANNs approval, the registry must commit to a 10-year lease and pay ICANN at least $25,000 a year to maintain it. In cases where two or more parties have applied for the same suffix, they can try to work it out among themselveswith cash being the most common persuader. If that doesnt work, ICANN will conduct an auction. Tindal says Donuts expects to spend millions of dollars in the auction phase.
So who benefits from this brave new, expanded internet?

Tindal suggests it will be the consumer. We think new names are going to be more meaningful, shorter, he says. Were giving to the market domain names that more easily and accurately reflect the identity of whatever a registrant is trying to convey.